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The Climate of Science-Art and the Art-Science of the Climate: Meeting Points, Boundary Objects and Boundary Work

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Abstract

This paper reports experiences from an art-science project set up in an educational context as well as in the tradition of placing artists in labs. It documents artists’ and scientists’ imaginations of their encounter and analyses them drawing on the concepts of “boundary object” and “boundary work”. Conceptually, the paper argues to broaden the idea of boundary objects to include inhibitory boundary objects that hinder rather than facilitate communication across boundaries. This focus on failures to link social worlds brings the boundary object concept closer to Gieryn’s boundary work and allows for a co-application of the two concepts in the analysis of cross-boundary communication. Empirically, the paper provides an in-depth ethnographic description of an art-science project as a resource for future practice. In conclusion, the art-science encounter included meeting points as well as multiple levels of boundary work which engaged the artists in a different way than as illustrators of scientific representations of climate change. The closer they got to the research practice the more the public and policy construct of climate change disappeared. Rather than political activism, the approach triggered explorations of the scientific context, including affirmative as well as critical re-imaginations of research practices. Artists and scientists acted as publics for one another, as resources to draw on for reflection and self-identification. But instead of cutting back or renegotiating standards of one’s own practice, especially the artists engaged in boundary work creating space to produce a piece of art according to their own criteria of quality and relevance.

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Notes

  1. Also, the terms employed to describe the approaches vary, including artist/scientist collaboration (Halpern 2012), artist-scientist discourse (Gabrys and Yusoff 2012), Sci-Art collaborations (Dowell and Weitkamp 2012), and art-science (Born and Barry 2010; Wienroth and Goldschmidt 2015). For consistence and readability, I use art-science throughout the paper notwithstanding the plurality of both arts and sciences.

  2. In the framework of the “Excellence Initiative”, a major funding programme commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (see Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft 2013), three “Clusters of Excellence” are currently funded in climate science.

  3. The so-called “Bologna Process” was launched by a 1999 ministerial agreement between European countries designed to ensure comparability in the standards and quality of higher education qualifications. According to the European Higher Education Area’s webpage, the Bologna process as of 2015 has 47 participating countries.

  4. A review of the project from the organiser’s perspective has been published elsewhere (Rödder 2015). The online presence of the research cluster is at https://www.clisap.de/de (last accessed on April 27, 2016).

  5. His perspective on the project is published in Krauß (2015).

  6. When speaking about one another, the project participants spoke of “scientists/researchers” or “artists/visiting artist researchers”, respectively. So while labelling might be instrumental in boundary work, I did not trace the systematic use of a particular label by certain actors or groups of actors.

  7. From this follows – as in the “dominant view” (Hilgartner 1990) of the science-public relationship – that professional knowledge and expertise are cast as superior (in this case scientific) to inferior (in this case lay) practices. For the case of the science-public nexus, this view has become known as the “deficit model”. Deficit-thinking implies that one side has to learn from the other side rather than suggesting mutual exchange (Wynne 1992).

  8. The following considerations benefited greatly from conversations with Stephen Hilgartner.

  9. The online presence of the project is at https://www.clisap.de/research/ia:-integrated-activities/usi/visiting-artist-researchers-3/ (last accessed on April 27, 2016).

  10. None of the groups that specified what they expected from the artist’s visit received any applications.

  11. It was also a site of participant observation, which was communicated from the start of the project.

  12. It is worth emphasising that the role of participant observer, which the visiting artist researchers took on in their research groups, is by itself a challenging one. The external visitor’s dilemma is that by his or her mere presence, the observer makes the observed situation more public. The degree to which this backlashes on the situation depends on its genuine degree of publicity. In our case, this publicity ranged from publicly accessible lectures to formal and informal conversations in research group contexts and private parties.

  13. A status as “guest researcher” in the Cluster comes with expectations, too, as is exemplified by survey questions that other (scientific) guests were asked to answer: “What exactly are you planning to work on while being at CliSAP? What is it that you and your expertise can contribute to the Cluster of Excellence CliSAP? What is it that you will be taking home from here? Do you already have an image of future activities that may arise from your trip to Hamburg?” (Retrieved in April 2014 from the then current version of the climate cluster’s homepage at http://www.klimacampus.de/631+M555102402c1.html?&L=1). These expectations, however, never became an issue throughout the project.

  14. In the science world, in contrast, organised scepticism has become an institutionalised principle (Merton 1942) through which science has “come to be identified with the communal and the communicable” (Daston 1998: 82). The norm is deeply internalised by researchers: “That is the rule that we bought into when we said we are gonna be scientists. That we agreed to a peer review system for grants, for publication, for life in general” (I 33:142, as quoted in Rödder 2009: 166).

  15. This was implied by a reviewer but is beyond my expertise and the scope of this paper.

  16. Just as I was giving the finishing touches to this manuscript, one of the art students emailed the following: “I yesterday finished my film after all. I really like the final product and it now matches the idea I had, and which I would have loved to be able to show a year ago. But Rome wasn’t built in a day I guess and reflection and sophistication need time”.

  17. Original quote: “Was wir tun können, ist einen diskursiven Raum abzustecken, in dem es möglich ist, dass Wissenschaftler und Künstler sich gegenseitig auf ihre Hände schauen können, weniger auf das, was sie sagen, als vielmehr auf das, was sie tun, wenn sie ihr Handwerk praktizieren”.

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Acknowledgements

The “visiting artist researcher” project was supported by the German-Research-Foundation (DFG)-funded Cluster of Excellence “Integrated Climate System Analysis and Prediction” at the University of Hamburg (DFG EXC 177 CliSAP). The manuscript was written while the author held a Fulbright visiting scholarship at Cornell University. Discussions with Stephen Hilgartner and Bruce Lewenstein and the hospitality of Cornell’s Department of Science and Technology Studies have been very important to the completion of this article. The author is grateful to Anke Allner for making “science meets arts” a CliSAP priority and wants to thank the project team Friedrich von Borries, Anita Engels, Nadine Frömter, Maria Görlich, Werner Krauß and Hans von Storch, and all participating scientists and artists who made themselves available for interview. She is particularly indebted to Werner Krauß for sharing his observations from a cultural anthropologist’s point of view, and for interviewing the artists, and to Maria Görlich for support with the literature review and manuscript preparation. The author would also like to thank Markus Dressel and two referees for critical and constructive comments on the manuscript.

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  1. Department of Social Sciences, Institute of Sociology, University of Hamburg, Grindelberg 5, 20144, Hamburg, Germany

    Simone Rödder

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Correspondence to Simone Rödder.

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Rödder, S. The Climate of Science-Art and the Art-Science of the Climate: Meeting Points, Boundary Objects and Boundary Work. Minerva 55, 93–116 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-016-9312-y

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